Influence Marketing

What is the difference between traditional word-of-mouth marketing and Influence Marketing?

Word-of-Mouth refers to an oral tradition. It relies on the added credibility of person-to-person communication, a personal recommendation1

To an extent, it implies people’s word have influence over other people’s mind, set of action, decision making process.

1 http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/term/82660.html

In my opinion, the real difference between WOM marketing and Influence marketing is the following:

For WOM, there is an indirect way of handling its marketing: you create experience that will push your customers to state something. You create a differentiating solution and you count on WOM to help your promotion and reputation to be established.2

For Influence, it is more proactive. It is a complete change in how you handle your business, taking into account, prioritizing & developing the social aspect of your core activity. There are INTERACTIONS, instead of the one way WOM that is only a repercussion of your good job at being socially clever.

What is the relationship between communities and your social brand - give your insights for this Slide (23rd)3 ?

Putting people first. The kind of reputation any type of ‘brand’ should aim at establishing.

When building your brand around the community, instead of the opposite, your’ego’ and all the negative sides of it gets forgotten. You are the Good Samaritan of a community; you aim at hire meaning than profit. Your community will be larger than the one you would have been able to build around the limited products and services you once offered. In addition, the way you interact and apprehend evolution of your customers interest is ‘Live’, for your first concern is not about getting rid of your stock but providing solutions to people.

2 ‘Learned a lot here : http://womma.org/downloads/3 http://www.slideshare.net/shivsingh/social-influence-marketing-trends-2967561?from=ss_embed

What is the relationship between Klout scores and Influence Marketing? Is a Klout score meaningful?

What does a Klout score ? Building a strong network of quality followers Quality and quantity of your interactions. Engage in interesting conversations on twitter. You are likely to get a lot of ReTweets and responses. Best way for this is to find something that is truly of interest to the people you are connected

to and to initiate the conversation

Klout score measures effectiveness at SM. For your brand, your community and prospects.

The rule of the game being to bring accurate interest to others, the real interest of the klout score is to measure how influential people are, select them in relation to the potential resonance for your brand, and then find ways to influence them. Easy to understand, but time and energy consuming

For the hotel below:

Create a SIM action plan Clearly state your objectives Select at least 3 Social Media as tactics (no points for Facebook) Show how the selected Social Media have synergies Explain why you selected these specific media How will you measure the results of the Influence Marketing

Hotel - Missoni

Some screenshots to help visualize

Action plan

1. Goals

At this point, it is about creating reputation, engagement, finding your community

2. key audiencePeople who look for comfort, colors, luxury, design, but also meaning. An illustration:

There is interest in reaching reputation at Edinburgh, for people who travel to Edinburgh, and for people who might never have thought of going to Edinburgh, but would be seduced by the hotel communication.

3. Focus - where most important forums/platforms/discussions.

TWITTER

Who are they following, who should they be following? I will not answer in two minutes. Plus they have already started:

4. Listen - where are you customers really? Where do they engage with each other? Who are their "influencers"?

It starts with twitter, short, inspirational tweets that lead to PEOPLE, with passions, interests, problems. Here one can find names and links to other pages: blogs, news insights, vlogs.

5. What is your story, your voice?From my experience, the development of a voice, just like you are on stage, is extremely important. Choices of words, ‘tone’ of written speech. Yes that exists. Make it evolve, it can always be improved

6. Is the risk plan in place?Vigilancy! Hire a community manager who is willing to work from something else than 9am to 5pm. Take somebody that shows empathy, sensitivity.

7. Success measurementGoogle analytics, measurement of the impact of a single tweet, development of an event.

Create events, see how it develops with time, etc….

How does one measure social improvement? With specific metrics, that tend to indicate a certain kind of improvement or not.

But more quality people going to your events will definitely increase sales and reputation.

8. Get key stakeholder on board, (HR, PR, privacy, security, web, legal, etc)

The community manager ( because now you need one) will have to integrate the heart of his community, the core social interest of the business: the employees!!!

It the communication of the hotel becomes a place for specific expression ( for example, the HR department will collaborate with the community manager to find their next bar tender), there are chances you will differentiate.